Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Amy Tan: Author of Opposites

7/29/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.
Susan Blackmore
Author of Ten Zen Questions
Born July 29, 1951

S. Blackmore

My Book World

Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. London: HarperCollins, 2003.

The Opposite of Fate is a joy to read, I would venture, whether you’re a Tan fan or not. The celebrated author modestly shares her wisdom with readers. Wisdom derived from her childhood, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Wisdom derived from a life marred with tragedy (family deaths, physical violence, and murder of a friend). Wisdom derived from her relationships, family and friends alike. Wisdom derived from her courage to try new things (from joining a rock band made up of other famous writers to escaping from a dangerous flood while camping near Lake Tahoe to traveling to China with her mother). Wisdom derived from her trial-and-error career in writing (as most writing careers may be). Wisdom about medicine as she suffers through a long (and undiagnosed) bout of Lyme disease. The book is composed of essays arranged in thematic sections, and some anecdotes or fragments tinkle like little bells of remembrance from one essay to the next, but you don’t mind the repetition because it demonstrates how interrelated all the parts of her singular life are. I wish I’d read it when it was published, but it is still a valuable document in understanding one of our most important American authors.
Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Rose Tremain
WEDS: AWW | Steven Millhauser
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRI: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest

Bite-Sized Poems Are Good for the Soul

7/22/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
Emma Lazarus
Author of The New Colossus
Born July 22, 1849

E. Lazarus

Summerfield, Ellen, Ed. Bite-sized Poems: An Anthology. Oregon: Independently Published, 2021.

This carefully curated and edited volume of poetry might be the beginning classroom teacher’s dream for teaching poetry. Summerfield, herself a poet, brings together over forty indeed brief poems (one as short as nine words but packed with meaning). Not only does she guide readers lovingly through each poem with thoughtful exegesis but she also provides at the end of each presentation references to YouTube and PBS readings of the poem or a poet’s website so that the curious persons might read on. However, not to limit the book’s appeal to an educational setting alone, it stands alone as one poet’s generous interpretation of a group of disparate but equally enchanting poems—each one a delicious chocolate lifted from the front cover of bite-sized delights: Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Bertolt Brecht, as well as Edna Kovacs and Gwendolyn Brooks, make up just a few of the poets whom she anthologizes.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Aldous Huxley
WEDS: AWW | Elizabeth Hardwick
THURS: AWW | Malcolm Lowry
FRI: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate

So Goeth the Fall

6/27/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
. . . we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes—this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Author of We Wear the Mask
Born June 27, 1872

P. L. Dunbar

The following post may be a bit self-indulgent—much longer than normal—but I simply must get what's bothering me off my chest. Trigger warning: if confessions or whining in any way get you going, then stop reading now. You are forgiven.

It irritates my partner Ken, when I’m sometimes told I look good (or young) for my age. I make this statement not as a matter of ego or vanity (well, not entirely) but as a point of departure for a vapid little tale of humor, irony, and maybe stupidity. It’s one that began long ago.

Dick and Vic c1971

When I was twenty-five, I worked at the Texas Tech University library in cataloging and often was mistaken for an undergraduate. When I introduced my twenty-year-old brother visiting from CU in Boulder, one librarian thought we were twins! Brother Vic was not amused. I shrugged but glowed inside with giddiness.

It happened again in my thirties, but by then I was rather cultivating the notion that had been planted in my head at twenty-five. I worked out at a gym, remained slim. I was young. I located a book (BOMC) that explained in a very hippy dippy manner, how to care for your skin naturally (with plasters of oatmeal paste, toner squeezed from a lemon). Someone said I looked happy. Sitting in a doctor’s office, I also ran across an article, in a ratty old magazine that I stole, about facial isometric exercises that strengthen the muscles beneath the face and chin. There are five exercises, and I’ve done them several times weekly since 1978, in large part, if I’m not in a hospital or on vacation.

Dick, LHS Faculty Pic

As I reached my forties and fifties and worked sixty-hour weeks, I didn’t hear much of that you-look-so-young kind of talk anymore. I became bald and gray. My job as a teacher of AP English stressed my face beyond belief (faculty yearbook pictures remain as proof). And if you have kids yourself, you just might not find it beyond belief that caring for young people can indeed age you. It was only at age fifty-four, when I retired, that I was able to relax and get a good night’s sleep, eat and exercise properly—regaining a certain vigor, vitality, and youth. I also learned to meditate, quieting the mind each morning that provided yet another layer of peace to my existence.

When I obtained a new doctor in the next decade, he did a doubletake when I announced that I was sixty-nine. I thought you were more like forty-seven. Ken, attending the appointment as my advocate, snorted and rolled his eyes yet again, and I didn’t blame him. It was fatuous of me to sit there and grin. A year later, as I went under sedation for a heart ablation, a bevy of nurses gushed, You are not seventy! What is your secret? As a joke, and as my last cogent words before succumbing to the general anesthetic, I murmured, “Good clean living.” The woman’s fading voice answered: “I’m a little late for thaaaat . . . .”

I’ve neglected to mention regular movement as a major contributor to my vigor and good health. Since I’ve acquired a Fitbit watch, I try to walk between 6,000 and 8,000 (3.5 miles) steps per day. I’ve logged as many as 12,000 or 17,000 (8.8 miles) in one day while sightseeing in Barcelona, Spain. I’ve also done Pilates workouts since 2002, whose exercises have strengthened and challenged my core, toned up all my muscles. Reduced back pain because fit muscles help keep your skeletal remains aligned properly. Mostly, but you have to keep after it.

A Segment of Our Backyard Walking Trail

During Covid, Ken and I had a walking trail of crushed granite installed in the backyard, combined with a narrow sidewalk and the patio, to meander from one end of the yard to the other. We do own a treadmill, but it is pleasurable to get outside and stride naturally on the ground. The trail provides a “track” whose lap is equal to one minute’s time.

On June 18, I was about to finish my walk—ten more minutes—when I tripped on a protruding drain spout. I had grazed it before and was aware of its presence, but that time I nailed it (or it nailed me), and the next thing I knew . . . I found myself face down on the sidewalk . . . the victim of gravity’s dark pull against the earth, that feeling of How’d I get here? My glasses and airpods were scattered like items at the scene of an accident—which, of course, it was. I’d been listening to The Plot Thickens, a fascinating Turner Classic Movies podcast production about the life of actor-comedian, Lucille Ball. Her whisky tenor (bass!) is still bellowing in my ear. But all I can think of is the old saw from the Bible, Proverbs 16:18. To paraphrase, “Pride Goeth before a Fall.”

Yes, upon my word, I crash to earth with the full weight of gravity against my back, smashing my youthful face—more precisely against my thick black sunglasses, which gouge a gash in my forehead but which most probably save me from breaking my nose or cheekbone. My first thought is, This isn’t good. Already a small pool of blood has gathered on the pavement, and it continues to drip from my head.

I quickly remove the shirt I am wearing and it becomes a rag, a way to stanch the bleeding (I later tell Ken to toss it in the trash, I never wish to see it again). I somehow have the wherewithal (and balance) to rise from all fours, abandon my fallen belongings and find my way inside to view myself in the bathroom mirror. This is not good, indeed. My right eyebrow is sporting a large gash in the way that a peach’s skin can sustain a gash upon falling from the tree, demonstrating really, how delicate human skin is. I inform Ken that I’ve got to get to an urgent care center ASAP (eschewing the three-hour wait at any hospital ER in town).

We arrive at Star ER on the South Loop at about four p.m., and the waiting room is empty. In attempting to fill out the remarkably simple paperwork, my head drips blood onto the floor. The receptionist says not to worry; they’ll clean it up. I’m holding back the blood with a single folded tissue brought from home; it is full, a plump crimson rose. Soon I’m called back to an examining room. The man waiting on me is a middle-aged, jocular doctor with multi-striped frames and tinted lenses. He injects Lidocaine (a cousin to Novocain) into a wide swath of my forehead, some of its coolness dribbling down my face. He now cleans the wound with a stinging antiseptic that would otherwise be making me scream and proceeds to make nine surgical stitches to mend that laceration along my right eyebrow (a friend jokes that I should take a Sharpie and do my left brow so that they match, ha ha). When the doctor is done, a woman disinfects the remaining abrasions on my hands, arms, knees, and legs. The place runs a CT scan on my head, and we wait. The doctor returns and informs me there is a small bleed in my brain, and he orders an ambulance to fetch me and rush me across town to University Medical Center. But not serious enough to elicit sirens. The driver takes the Loop to Marsha Sharp Freeway, shortening the drive to seven minutes or less.

When I arrive at UMC, it is six p.m., and I’m rolled on a gurney into Trauma Unit #1. It seems as if twenty people leap upon my body at once (and in other circumstances such a situation might be rather tantalizing), but more probably the best-looking group of men and women I’ve ever seen, some medical students, some young doctors, begin to work away at me in a joint but chaotic effort. Some hands untie my shoes and remove my polka dot socks (I’m not picky about what I wear during my backyard strolls). Other hands in this kind of assault pull off my running shorts and athletic supporter (oh, really, doctor), my shirt. Next, a handsome man (even masked) in blue scrubs, a Doctor Vincent, badgers me with questions: First, my family history of diseases, and I tell him. Do I drink? Yes, socially. Socially like every day or just Saturdays? None of your business.

And then he asks me how my accident happened. Some chatty youngsters stab holes in my left arm for IV’s (at least one of them a mistake because she happens to confess), and one hole in my right arm, I suppose for a different drip yet to come. I’m turned on my left side (“One, two, three, turn), and another set of hands pounds each vertebrae, and I am to yell (to be heard above the cacophony) “No” if it doesn’t hurt with each attack. None does. I’m asked to squeeze my butt cheeks (incidentally, one of my Pilates exercises—20 squeezes per set—designed to help keep my buttocks high and perky, meh). Good job, a male voice says not entirely with sincerity. All of these things are done to me as if I'm a plastic dummy, a doll on which to practice their pin-pricking and other medical stuff—as if I am not real.

I’m turned on my right side (“One, two, three, turn) for yet another purpose. Then I’m laid flat (without getting laid) on my back again. All of these actions take place on a thin, flat board slipped between my back and the gurney. Asked if I hurt, I must amaze all concerned, instead of complaining about the mess on my head, by informing them I have four titanium screws in my spine from a previous surgery—and that that board is fucking killing me. They plaster a pain-relieving pad across my lower back, which will remain there during my entire stay, thus relieving some of the pain caused by lying in hospital beds. Because I may be cognitively challenged after the fall, I’m bombarded with even more questions that I must answer satisfactorily, because suddenly the room empties as if my ass just isn’t up to snuff for this crowd (recall, if you will, my veiled rape metaphor).

I am now moved to an Intensive Care Unit room with only a curtain to separate me from the tumult, and an Asian woman with an ESL accent takes a long history and types it into the computer. Several times she, also a student, is helped by the youngish man who heads the main desk—his being the only bitchy personality I encounter during the weekend. Until midnight, when I am moved to a regular room, I languish on this uncomfortable bed with nothing but my thoughts. Ever since I was at Star ER I’ve run through my meditation mantras, attempting to take my mind off the obvious: injury and trauma. The mantras help a little, but they are shouted down by competing thoughts of pain, thoughts about my ruined looks, thoughts of how long I’ll be spending in this life-saving but God awful place.

Finally, at midnight, after several false starts (I easily eavesdrop on the main desk phone calls), I’m moved to a regular single room, GT-392. I ask the orderly rolling me along the hallways what GT stands for because my inquiring mind (as dinged-up as it is) wants to know. He mumbles something about it just being named that way. Yet he forgets that I can read the overhead signs as we travel through this labyrinthine building, and I note “Gerontology and Trauma” printed in large letters as we near my room. Ah haaa. Yet my placement is a blessing. Gone is the puerile chatter of ICU workers. Gone is the bustle of gurneys in and out of slamming doors. Agonizing moans and screams not my own. My GT room is quiet, and for the next thirty-six hours, I am allowed to sleep except for short interruptions to take my vitals, draw yet more blood, and whatever else the staff wish to do to me or for me (I'm served several good meals). Except for a couple of plump, gray-haired female nurses, everyone else, male or female, who enters the room, seems young. But even they are plump, out of breath if they exert themselves in any way. Serving twelve-hour shifts, it seems, these faithful servants obviously have no time to work out, to keep fit. The only rather thin, short man in blue scrubs happens to be a physician from the neurology department, who deems that I shall be released later Monday morning. Everyone who has entered my room—from orderlies, to aides, to nurses and doctors—seems to take seriously the hospital motto, “Service Is Our Passion.” So unlike the private hospital a mile and a half from here, or like hospitals from my past, in which I felt lucky to get the time of day or a response to my request radioed to the nurse’s station by that walkie talkie lying next to my head.

Late Monday morning, a cute young blonde nurse named Kristina rushes around to help me prepare to check out. I ask if I can shower my smelly body, and she accommodates me by getting the trickle of warm water started in the walk-in shower (no scalding allowed here). She leaves to get my paperwork in order. It’s faster and cheaper to buy my new RXs from the UMC pharmacy, so Kristina also dispatches an aide downstairs to secure them for me: I happen to have cash to facilitate matters. After my shower, Kristina and I get my belongings together. I sign a bunch of paperwork, copies of it go in an already existing folder, and I am wheeled downstairs by the same aide to the front entrance, where Ken is waiting to pick me up.

Ah, after the fall. Since I’m stubbornly not on social media any longer (except for LinkedIn, which may not count), I send an email or texts with photos to friends and loved ones. I get the responses of sympathy I was probably hoping to elicit: Wishes for a quick recovery, Things could have been worse, You still look handsome. Oh, yeah, that’s the one I was waiting to read. I’m gonna be all right. Yes, nine days later, many of the scabs have already fallen away, leaving a pink layer of new skin. I exude a little pride here, but mostly gratitude. Yes, I'm very grateful.

TOMORROW: A Writer's Wit | The 1969 Stonewall Riots

Author Loves His Tulip

5/27/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
John Barth
Author of Lost in the Funhouse
Born May 27, 1930

J. Barth

My Book World

Ackerley, Joe Randolph. My Dog Tulip. With an introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York: NYRB, 1999 (1965).

A man in his sixties when he writes this book, Ackerley tells the story of his beloved Alsatian or German Shepherd, Tulip. I began the book thinking Tulip’s story would be broader in context, but I was wrong. A large middle section involves Ackerley’s attempts to mate Tulip properly with another Alsatian. In minute detail, and in a way that only the British can do, he writes delicately about an indelicate subject: Tulip’s female parts and how they operate every time she is on heat (a term he deems crude but still uses). A swelling this, and dripping that. But overall, the book is an unsentimental portrait of what according to Ackerley is an extraordinary Alsatian bitch whom he loves very much.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words

Rosshalde: Story of a Child

5/20/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A working definition of fathering might be this: fathering is the act of guiding a child to behave in ways that lead to the child's becoming a secure child in full, thus increasing his or her chances of being happy and fruitful as a young adult.
Clyde Edgerton
Author of Walking Across Egypt
Born May 20, 1944

C. Edgerton

My Book World

Hesse, Hermann. Rosshalde. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Bantam, 1956 (1914).

Spoiler: This novel is primarily about the death of a young child, a son named Pierre. But it is also about the death of a family, how a husband and wife drift apart and divide their love between two sons, the elder “belonging” to the wife and Pierre belonging to his father. But there isn’t much belongingness for any of the family members. The book overall is about the end of their life together at the estate called Rosshalde, an expansive property, a mansion, that seems to have a life of its own. An enchanting but sad read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

Writing at One Hundred

4/1/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.
Rachel Maddow
Author of Bag Man
Born April 1, 1973

R. Maddow

My Book World

Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-year-Old Author. New York: Simon, 2016.

The most fascinating aspect of this book may be indeed be Wouk’s age (b. May 27, 1915 and d. May 17, 2019, making him 10 days short of 104). One of the keys to his longevity may be that he never stops writing. In this slim tome, he relates the stories of each one of his books and how they come to be, but along with each one, he also shares where he is at the time. For example, while working on one novel for seven years, he and his wife buy a house in the Caribbean and reside there with their sons in paradise until he is finished. The book is a great way to become acquainted with his oeuvre if one isn’t already.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | *Anthony Quinn's Novel, Freya
(*British author, not the late American actor)

How We Live, How We Die

3/18/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
George Plimpton
Author of Paper Lion
Born March 18, 1927

G. Plimpton

My Book World

Athill, Diana. Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir. New York: Norton, 2009.

Diana Athill lived to be 101. She published this book at age ninety, ninety-one. An editor for a long time, she writes here and writes convincingly of her life, not only her old age but her younger life as well: her loves and losses, her miscarriage near menopause, her decision very early on that she doesn’t much care for children (though she mourns the child she loses, demonstrating a complexity of her own character). Somewhere towards the end of this thin tome, Athill states,

So an individual life is interesting enough to merit examination, and my own is the only one I really know (as Jean Rhys, faced with this same worry, always used to say), and if it is to be examined, it should be examined as honestly as is possible within the examiner’s inevitable limitations. To do it otherwise is pointless—and also makes very boring reading, as witness many autobiographies by celebrities of one sort or another” (181).

Athill’s longevity may, in part, be due to an active life, one in which she continues to learn how to do new things—not well or professionally, perhaps—but something novel nonetheless. One among many lessons we all might learn from her as we all slouch toward that same ending.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Shumacher's Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life

Untold Railroad History

3/11/2022

A WRITER'S WIT:
Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.
D. J. Enright
Author of The Oxford Book of Death
Born March 11, 1920

D. J. Enright

My Book World

Sedgwick, John. From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West. New York: Avid, 2021.

If you’ve ever driven on an Interstate highway in the western United States—at posted speeds of 80 mph or faster, and people do zoom faster—it can seem as if you’re passing through a Disneyland sort of panorama. Mountains. Red arches. The occasional evergreen—with your AC cranked down low. In John Sedgwick’s book, however, one learns what it was like to traverse that terrain as a railroad builder, including the workers themselves.

Sedgwick traces the lives and work of two men—Strong erecting the Santa Fe and Palmer, the Rio Grande—who make “river to the sea” travel possible beginning in the late 1880s. This journey includes side trips by way of chapters devoted, for example, to the beloved Harvey House hotels, the first chain of its kind to provide bed, beverage, and breakfast along the way. Always, however, Sedgwick returns to the struggle these two men mount against the elements, terrain, and government (state and federal) but mostly against each other, to open up the West to the established civilization in the East. It is quite a ride, and Sedgwick ensures that you do not miss a minute of it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End

Survival Course for Actors

1/21/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I've just always been fascinated by what our belief can do, and what happens when we misuse that.
M. K. Hobson
Author of The Ladies and the Gentlemen
Born January 21, 1969

M. K. Hobson

My Book World

Fischer, Jenna. The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide. With a foreword by Steve Carell. Dallas: BenBella, 2017.

I’m not an actor, but I imitated one in my youth, playing a duke in third grade, singing in a high school production of Damn Yankees, and marching down the aisle in college as part of the forest ranger chorus in Little Mary Sunshine. I loved Fischer's book because during the time it took me to read it, I realized I probably didn’t have what it would have taken to become an actor. At the same time, if I had attempted such a thing, I would so have used a book like this one as a guide.

Fischer addresses all the nuts and bolts of starting out: getting head shots done (professional ones, not phone pics), building a resumé, auditioning, even the machinations of how things work on a television or film set. Most of all, Fischer lets readers in on a little secret. Although the money can be great, the real joy of an actor’s life is ACTING. Becoming a person other than yourself. Developing a feel for all of humanity by taking on various roles. I would add that acting may be the most difficult of all the fine arts: memorizing lines (sometimes in a very short timeframe), bringing those lines to life in conjunction with a script and the ensemble, becoming (insofar as possible) that other person, taking direction, leaving your ego at the door, learning ancillary skills like singing, dancing, or fencing. If you wouldn’t do it for free (and millions of actors do), then you probably wouldn’t do it well in order to make a living.

Fisher doesn’t rely on her experiences alone; she peppers the pages with sidebars of advice from other actors: “I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera—both of which I did as soon as I left the Acting Company and was starving” (52).—Kevin Kline. And in the last section of the book, Fischer cites her interviews with four working actors, and they give, at length, their take on the profession by way of sharing with readers many more good tips. A must-read for aspiring actors and people who love Jenna Fischer (and I do) alike!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway: a Novel

Baldwin: an Empathic Actor

10/15/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
Author of Discipline and Punish
Born October 15, 1926

M. Foucault

My Book World

Baldwin, Alec. Nevertheless: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

In some ways this is an ordinary celebrity book. Baldwin writes about his acting career, his divorce from a famous actor, his new wife and family, and all his children. But Alec Baldwin also distinguishes himself by sharing how he comes to be an actor. In his preface he tells of his childhood, of wanting to be something one day and something else the next day. Acting allows him to become, in a sense, all of these things through the roles he plays. He also shares with readers about how his childhood of near destitution (his mother and five siblings living on their father’s teaching salary). Most interesting, however, is his quest to find himself, to be true to his desire to balance himself on that fine tightrope of acting for its own sake (the stage, the Broadway stage) and film (its commercial and sometimes lucrative nature). He glosses long lists of books he loves, plays and films he loves, actors (male and female) whom he loves and why. He peppers his writing with pieces of classical music he admires—a sign of a truly educated person.

Baldwin's is a rich life of pursuing happiness and sometimes coming up short but also getting up off the floor and trying again, whether to connect with a new woman or say yes to a new play or tackle the fields of philanthropy or politics. The man is that bright and that secure that he can make these choices and live with them. Because, in his youth, he is soooo good looking (the only reason I watched TV’s Knot’s Landing), he is sometimes approached or accosted by gay men who believe they might get lucky. To Baldwin’s credit, he is secure enough in his personhood, his masculinity, that he (by his own recognizance anyway) takes these incidents in stride (informing one man, an older mentor, however, that if he ever kisses him full on the mouth again, he will break every bone in his body—yet they do remain friends). He even goes as far as to say he “loves” a certain man he’s worked with and who knows? “he might be gay.” We know he isn’t, but it’s sweet of him to be so empathic that he might give it some consideration. That seems to be what his whole life is about: giving a role consideration before dispensing with it or forging ahead. We all should be so considerate in our own roles.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery

Monette: Still the Last Watch

9/11/2020

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's [sic] starving!
O. Henry
Author of Gift of the Magi
Born September 11, 1862

O. Henry

My Book World

Monette, Paul. Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise. New York: Harcourt, 1994.

Dear Paul,
I’m pretending that you gaze over my shoulder and peruse this piece about you and Last Watch of the Night. On pages 267-8, you discuss your hoarding of books, and I’m so glad to learn that I’m not the only one who does this. In recataloging my library of 1,300 books, a year ago, I realize that 300 of them remain unread, and, until now [during COVID, I am endeavoring to catch up, now having read fifty-six], yours has been one of them. I feel disgusted that I didn’t read it when it came out, but that was the first year of teaching AP English in high school, and my reading tasks were to stay at least one chapter ahead of my five classes of bright bulbs. So now to why I love this book and why it will never be dated.

Your essays, at times, seem long and meandering, but readers, make no mistake, they are ordered; they have organization. I believe it is a nonlinear order in which, for example, in an essay about travel, you mention sojourning with all three of your long-term relationships: Roger, Stevie, and Winston. What I like about this sort of organization is it allows the essayist to discuss bigger pictures, larger topics. In the first essay entitled, “Puck,” ostensibly about yours and Roger’s Rhodesian ridgeback-Lab mix, the piece spans out, in which this “noble beast” (28) is the glue holding you two lovers together until Roger succumbs to AIDS.

In another essay, “Gert,” you bring to light your first relationship with a lesbian, in this case, Gertrude Macy, a “maiden great-aunt” of one of your pupils. After she reads your novel manuscript, Gert asks, “Does it have to be so gay?” You answer:

“Oh, indeed it did. The gayer the better. I launched into my half-baked credo, invoking the name of [E. M.] Forster, the writer to whom I was most in thrall, and the one who had failed me the most as well. When Forster decided he dare not publish Maurice, for fear of the scandal and what his mother would think; when he locked that manuscript in a drawer for fifty years until he died, he silenced much more than himself. He put up a wall that prevented us, his gay and lesbian heirs, from having a place to begin” (43). I tend to agree, but one must think about the consequences for Forster if he had released Maurice. Lost revenue? Loss of a career? His life? Prison time?

A fallen Catholic yourself, in fact a defiant ex-Catholic, you discuss your relationship with several different “priests.” You cover gravesites and “The Politics of Silence.” “A One-Way Fare,” your paean to travel, becomes a metaphor for the one-way trip we all make through life. I love how you move from Mont-Saint-Michel to Noel Coward’s Private Lives, to a ten-line excerpt from that play, and on to Greece, all within a page—yet all connected.

Young gays need to read you, just as we read Forster and Isherwood, our forebears, so that they may know from whence they come. They must realize that the fight for freedom and equality is never over. It just shifts from one opponent to another. You fought to bring AIDS into a national focus, and perhaps the young will see that the COVID-19 battle is much the same: unless we change our national leadership COVID will be with us forever, just like AIDS is still with us. One must thank you for your fight, which ended all too soon. You would just now be enjoying a long-deserved homage at the ripe age of seventy-five.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored

She Explains Too Little

9/4/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
Author of The Theatre and Its Double
Born September 4, 1896

A. Artaud

My Book World

Lardner, Kate. Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid. New York: Ballantine, 2004.

About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: Poor writing and poor editing. What could have been enlightening and touching was scattered and uninteresting. Lardner keeps an emotional distance throughout that is not very pleasant.

In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just lacks a certain depth. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who ceases to be offered film roles because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career.

What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family. Perhaps it’s her way of dealing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise.

Kon-Tiki: A Wondrous Naiveté

8/14/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.
Mary E. Pearson
Author of Dance of Thieves
Born August 14, 1955

M. E. Pearson

My Book World

Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand, 1950.

This book may have been written for adults, but I have to believe its adventurous tale appeals to the child inside each one of us. A Norwegian scholar develops a theory that at one time people of Peru crossed the South Pacific; Heyerdahl acquires this idea because huge statues on Easter Island so closely resemble ones found in Peru. Very quickly it seems he scrabbles together a crew of five other men and from drawings of a raft that would have been used in earlier times, the men build the Kon-Tiki essentially from nine huge balsa logs. That feat itself is a large undertaking as the men somehow receive permission from Peruvian officials to go into the forest and harvest such logs from balsa trees—even though commercial logging of balsa has been disallowed for some time.

Then there is the 4,000 mile adventure in which, at first, the raft with a sail is seized by the Humboldt Current. However, as they escape its grasp, the six men embark on a most idyllic, though challenging, cruise across the South Pacific. They worry little about food (though they’ve brought certain stores with them) as they are besieged in the morning with flying fish that they either cook for breakfast or use as bait to catch bigger fish. Creatures large and small are curiously drawn to their vessel, and, though the men are wary at first, they become friends with the aquatic beasts. The primitive raft has its shortcomings so when they finally come upon an island, because of the raft’s steering limitations, they must pass it by. Sometime later, however, they spot another island group, and this time their voyage comes to an abrupt end as the raft breaks up on a reef.

What follows may be the most delightful part of Heyerdahl’s perfectly arced narrative. Curious natives from a nearby island of 127 inhabitants see smoke from the men’s cooking fire and carefully approach them. The six men become heroes to the village and are treated royally for weeks on end before they are able to use their ham (amateur) radio and contact Tahiti and then Norwegian officials. A 4,000 ton ship is dispatched to pick them up, and then the six men and all villagers part with tears in their eyes. The book may be tinged with a childlike naiveté, but it is also filled with a certain curiosity and courage, qualities that are necessary for cultures to cross boundaries and for its inhabitants to realize they have more in common than they don’t.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 4: My Book World | Kate Lardner's Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

Alison Smith Memoir Always Timely

6/12/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else—and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
Djuna Barnes
Born June 12, 1892
Author of Nightwood

D. Barnes

My Book World

Smith, Alison. Name All the Animals. New York: Scribner, 2004.

If I had had the time, I would have read Name All the Animals in one sitting. In this memoir, the author begins benignly by sharing with readers in great detail how close she and her brother Roy are at ages nine and twelve, respectively, so close that their mother names them Alroy. Together, they explore an abandoned house in their neighborhood. And then, in a similar way to how it must shock the narrator and her parents, it shocks the reader to learn of Roy’s death at eighteen. The rest of the book covers several years following in which Alison finishes high school. She demonstrates how her family, good Catholics, avoid all the questions that should be asked and tackled. Alison develops an inner and outer world of her own making, all in aid of forgetting and yet commemorating her brother. In failing to grieve, however, she cuts herself off from most people until she meets one she can’t resist. Smith tells this harrowing story without sentiment but with all due regard for the truth. She structures it in such a manner that readers discover along with her how she must grow up, how she must proceed without Roy in her life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Mississippi In Depth

5/8/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
Jane Roberts
Born May 8, 1929

J. Roberts

My Book World

Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Viking, 1996.

This combination of “travel writing, history, and memoir,” as blurbed on the back cover is a profound work. Walton, noted poet and author, takes the reader on a multilayer journey. One of those journeys may be the physical. He tells of the move his Mississippian parents make from their home state to Chicago as young adults to establish a better life for their children. One is always aware of the physical: the hot Mississippi summer days, the fields of blindingly white cotton, the cool of air conditioning and iced drinks. Walton takes pains to give us a full history of the state, beginning with the Native Americans who occupy the land for centuries before others arrive and kill or move them off. He doesn’t stop there but gives us a history of the slave, the African-American: lynchings, beatings, the cold war that Whites take up against Blacks after the Civil War. But Walton’s journey of Mississippi, which begins mostly after he is an adult, includes memories of visiting family there, interviewing a broad range of white and black citizens. He describes the “polite” way that citizens treat each other, as long as one observes one’s role. He also describes the fight for the vote, which continues to this day. Included in his personal comments are original poems of note that help to illuminate his narrative. History. Travel. Poetry. He appeals to the broad spectrum of human perception and sensibility. I regret that it took me this long to read a book I bought in 2006, ten years after it was published. Yet Walton’s message is still a vibrant one of truth.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's novel, Cleanness

Writing a Family Memoir | History II

3/11/2020

We must love our friends as true amateurs love paintings; they have their eyes perpetually fixed on the fine parts, and see no others.
Madame Louise d’Epinay
Born March 11, 1726

Madame d'Epinay

[If you missed yesterday's post, please scroll down. This will make more sense.]

WHEN THE BOOK BEGAN
In 2012 I swabbed my cheeks to get a DNA readout from National Geographic Genographic Project. Briefly, the Project determined that my “deep DNA” was about 41% Germanic, 41% Mediterranean, and 17% Southwest Asian. The NGGP results piqued my curiosity about the three generations of Dutch (half), German (quarter), and Welsh (quarter) ancestors immediately preceding me.

HOW THE BOOK PROGRESSED
I wouldn’t know much about those people, except that my mother and to some degree my father saved everything, which brings me to the second stage of my work. Since my parents died in the aughts, I had stored away boxes and boxes of documents and photographs and negatives, some going back a hundred years or more. My intention was to toss everything I could, but I decided that I should examine every document before disposing of it.

WHAT I FOUND
Hundreds of letters my mother wrote (I’d never before read them); letters my grandfather wrote to his hometown newspaper from France when he fought in WWI, with naïve but fresh descriptions of the Atlantic, the British and the French people; letters to and from other relatives; a dozen issues of Jayhawkerinfrance, a newspaper published by my grandfather’s Kansas Army regiment tracing their movements through France; journals my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my great-grandmother kept, as well as my father’s journal covering the two and a half years he spent in the South Pacific during World War II. In addition, I located newspaper cuttings that pertained to many family members, including ornately written obituaries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I came upon creative writing; art work; photographs, and much more revealing the joys and heartaches of my family.

WHAT I DID WITH THE INFORMATION
First, I felt compelled to write about my nuclear family, portraying how my parents (both with rather nonnurturing mothers) raised my brother and sister and me. I felt compelled to tell about my sister with Down syndrome and how her disabilities affected our family life, both positive and negative. I included a chapter about the tiny house (750 square feet) where I grew up, almost a character in its own right, a dark dwelling where many sad yet joyous things happened. In another section I write about my parents’ youth: my mother’s life on a farm in Kansas; my father’s life in suburban New York City. In the next section, I write about my maternal grandmother and her parents, a great-grandmother who suffers the loss of her first husband to a flood. I write about my maternal grandfather and his parents, even my third-great-grandfather who hails from Wales in 1790 (consulting several books having been written about him by other relatives). I then turn to my father’s parents and their parents, who live in Breda, Holland for many generations before my grandparents emigrate to the US. From my memory and from documents and from extrapolation I glean instances of abuse, premature deaths that cripple the family, shotgun weddings, mysterious decisions (like not placing my grandfather’s name on his crypt in New York), psychological and physical illness, severed hands and time spent in hospitals, missed opportunities for education, and much more. In the fourth section I return to revisit ghosts of my sister and my parents, once again bringing up the past but in an atmosphere of forgiveness, seeing everyone in his or her full humanity. Acceptance.

WHERE I AM NOW
I have written four drafts. In the first I submitted, over a two-year period, one chapter per month, to my writing group. After studying their critiques, I wrote a second draft; this time returning to my research to include information that had, the first time around, seemed irrelevant. In the third draft, I finally abandoned the idea of directly addressing each ancestor and relied on first and third person. Now, most recently, I realized, finally, that the inner chapters were not presented in the most felicitous order, so I am reordering them and dealing with the ripples that such a change makes. I feel close to the end, having read the six-hundred-page MS aloud multiple times for rhythm and to eliminate clunky language, not to mention other errors that only seem to rise to the surface when read aloud (such as omitted articles or verbs). I am ready to give birth to this monster and hope to wrap things up as soon as the thing presents itself to me. I have never enjoyed writing a book as much as this one, but I am ready to be done and move on!

I shall keep you informed!

Take a look at members of my tribe in the slideshow below.

FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert P. Watson's The Nazi Titanic

Sorry for Not Writing Sooner

3/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American.
John Rechy
Born March 10, 1931

J. Rechy

Writing a Family History | memoir I

Usually when I decide not to post for any length of time I give my readers a heads up, but this time I forgot. I offer my apologies to those who’ve missed me. To those who haven’t, meh. :) So where have I been?

On February 3, I arrived once again at Hacienda María on the grounds of the Native American Seed Company near Junction, Texas—and didn't return home until February 29. Although the company’s main agenda is to raise and sell native grass and wildflower seeds worldwide, they also offer two dwellings as part of their eco-tourism enterprise. Cool River Cabin is located down in the valley and a bit closer to the Llano River, where one can kayak and canoe. For the third time now, I’ve stayed in the Hacienda, a beautiful sort of mini-villa high atop a ridge overlooking the verdant fields and woods of the farm and river valley. My first morning there, a fog rose from the river and engulfed everything in its mist. Each day I hiked at least twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, in order to reach my goal of 10,000 steps.

Now I didn’t go just for the gorgeous, pastoral environment, but went there to finish a book I’ve been working on since 2016. Each of the three visits to Hacienda, I’ve toiled steadily through each day, seven days a week, to bring this tome to its conclusion, anywhere from five to seven hours a day—and yet it is still not done (I keep those same hours when I work at home). I chose to watch little TV (two films, Judy and Jojo Rabbit), didn’t necessarily carry my phone with me or play music. February was a beautiful month in the Hill Country. When I partook of my five o’clock constitutional, I would often enjoy it out on the patio in a breezeless seventy-degree weather. The nights were cool to mild, the days mild to warm. Only one cold, rainy spell kept me indoors for half a day. Groceries are a ten-minute drive into Junction itself, a Lowe’s. And if you have enough gumption to go further south, Kerrville has a CVS, an H-E-B, and a Walmart—about a fifty-minute drive on I-10.
So what did I work on?
I guess I’d call it a family memoir. How about I tell you more next time!

Before you leave, check out my photographs below.

TOMORROW: Writing a Family History | Memoir II

'Home Work" Quite a Ride

1/24/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
Pierre Beaumarchais
Born January 24, 1732

P. Beaumarchais

MY BOOK WORLD

Andrews, Julie with Emma Walton Hamilton. Home Work. New York: Hachette, 2019.

Andrews begins the book with a summary of her first memoir, Home, that came out in 2009, which is a good thing. It induces the reader to want to locate a copy (for the details must be juicy), as well as it gives readers a view of what her early life was like before she became famous and moved to Hollywood to work.

Unlike many memoirs which can be of a meandering nature, this one moves quickly from one locale to the next, one creative project to the next, one family crises to the next with little reflection, except by way of journal entries from the time period Andrews is calling to mind. Having said that, I believe Andrews moves from locale to locale because that is the nature of the business she is in. In making a film, she must relocate to where the project is being shot. With regard to each film there are preproduction stories, stories during the shooting, and then stories about when the film or live show opens—the reviews, both good and bad. And I’m sorry, of course, Ms. Andrews does reflect upon the relationships she has with her two husbands, her daughter by the first one, the step children she acquires (happily) from her second husband, her siblings and her Moms and Dads, plus the two daughters that she and Blake Edwards adopt from Vietnam. Julie reflects, but it’s often a hand-wringing followed, most of the time, by things turning out all right.

Still, the memoir has more than a few amusing anecdotes. My favorite involves one with Mike Nichols and Carol Burnett. The three are staying in the same hotel as Julie and Carol prepare for their joint TV special. He wants to meet late at night after his train has been delayed, and the women agree. They get into their pajamas and robes and when they know he’s in the hotel, they wait for him at the elevators. They decide it would be funny if they are kissing when Nichols gets off the elevator:

“At this point, one of the elevators went ‘ping!’ so I whipped Carol across my lap, making it look as if I had her in a full embrace. The doors opened … and the elevator was packed …. Nobody got out, nobody got in. As the doors closed, they collectively leaned toward the center so they could get a better view. Carol and I simply cracked up.
         Suddenly another elevator went ‘ping’; I quickly dipped Carol over my knee again. The doors opened and a lone woman stepped out, glanced at us both, and then hurried on down the hall. By now, we were both weeping with laughter. Carol slid off my knee and crawled behind the sofa to hide.
         ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
         She couldn’t even reply, she was laughing so hard. With a touch of panic, I noticed that the lady who had just passed us had turned around and was now coming back. Leaning over the sofa, she inquired, ‘Excuse me, are you Carol Burnett?’
         In a strangled voice Carol said, ‘Yes,” Then raising a hand above the sofa to point at me, she added, ‘And this is my friend, Mary Poppins!’” (76)

The elevator pings again, and the two women stage their kiss once again, “and Mike stepped out of the elevator. Without pausing or even breaking a smile, he casually said, ‘Oh, hi, girls,’ and continued down the corridor. Touché! ” (77).

Anyone like me, who has followed the career of Ms. Andrews from Mary Poppins until now, will appreciate the depths to which she mines her soul to share once again with us her life and her talents. It’s quite a ride.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

My Journey of States-50 Oregon

10/9/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.
Beverly Cleary
Born April 12, 1916
In McMinnville, Oregon

B. Cleary

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fiftieth post of fifty.

Oregon (2015)

Not only do I get to conclude my fifty-part series with the thoughts of one of my favorite childhood authors, Beverly Cleary, who lives at age 103, but with one of my favorite states. Ken and I arrived at our destination, Oceanside, in the middle of June, 2015. Our friends whom we met at Oceanside, had cautioned us about a sort of mix master coming through Portland, and we had studied digital maps galore, but we still managed to lose a lane and wind up for a few panicked seconds wondering where our car would go. It all worked out.

The four of us shared a lovely three-bedroom house on a steep hill. Luckily, it was sunny the entire time, yet the temps never rose above the mid-fifties. We were privileged to witness a double low-tide, in which more beach than usual was exposed, leaving a great deal of sea life visible until the tide returned. I captured a bit of that beauty in the photos above, also a few other sights we managed to take in along the coast.

Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union in 1859 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2009.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky   46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont   48. Montana
49. Wyoming 50. Oregon

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's Novel The Travelers

My Journey of States-48 Montana

9/11/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.
--Ivan Doig
Born June 27, 1939
White Sulphur Springs, Montana
Died April 9, 2015
Seattle, Washington

I. Doig

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-eighth post of fifty.

Montana (2014, 2015)

I first became acquainted with Montana when, as a child, I learned that a great uncle lived there, was superintendent of schools in Miles City for nearly thirty-five years—although I would never visit the state until many years later. In 2014, while visiting South Dakota, Ken and I made a day-trip to cross over into North Dakota and Montana. We returned to the state mid-June 2015, to enter Yellowstone National Park. A mistake tourist-wise—way too crowded—but still, we did attempt to enjoy its stark and majestic beauty. We hope to go back either in May or September one year.

Montana became the forty-first state on November 8, 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky   46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert Caro's Working

My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

9/4/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
—Louis L’Amour
Born March 22, 1908
in Jamestown, North Dakota
Died June 10, 1988
in Los Angeles, California

L. L'Amour

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-seventh post of fifty.

North Dakota (2014)

Our visit to North Dakota was rather abbreviated. We were staying in South Dakota, and one day we got in the car and drove to their neighbor to the north. We had been aware that much in the way of oil drilling was going on because big trucks with oil rig business would pass us on Highway 83. When we actually crossed over the border we saw how intense the drilling was. ND’s area is 70,698 square miles. Its GDP is $52.527 Bn. Forty-four percent of its population of 755, 393 is college educated. And its capital is located in Bismarck.

North Dakota became a state November 2, 1889, the fortieth state to enter the union.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky 46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Garrett Peck's The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath.

We Are All Beneficiaries

8/30/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley
Born August 30, 1797

M. Shelley

My Book World

Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.

At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:

“The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost. Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime” (220)

In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)

As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

My Journey of States-46 South Dakota

8/28/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing fiction is . . . an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
--Rose Wilder Lane
Born December 5, 1886
De Smet, South Dakota Territory
Died October 30, 1968
Danbury, Connecticut

R. Wilder Lane

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-sixth post of fifty.

South Dakota (2014)

Ken and I arrived in South Dakota in early May. Grasses had greened, and some trees leafed out, yet on one of the days we headed for Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the sky spit snow in our eyes, and the wind shoved frigid air across our faces; the second time we returned, as photos above reveal, the skies were clear. Later in the day, we visited Crazy Horse Memorial, a thirty-minute drive southwest of Mount Rushmore.

South Dakota became a US territory with the Lousiana Purchase, in 1803. It achieved statehood on November 2, 1889 as the fortieth state.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Janny Scott's The Beneficiary

My Journey of States-45 Nebraska

8/21/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
Ernest K. Gann
Born October 10, 1910
Lincoln, Nebraska
Died December 19, 1991
Friday Harbor, Washington

E. K. Gann

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-fifth post of fifty.

Nebraska (2014)

Ken and I stayed at one of those nondescript road motels that begins with an “H.” The young woman at the desk asked me what brought us to Nebraska. And I told her that I was attempting to log visits to four of my last ten states. She seemed to have an inferiority complex about Nebraska which I’ve witnessed before. One time, I met a young gay man visiting Texas from Omaha. I simply asked him what gay life was like in Omaha, certainly assuming it was better than Lubbock’s, and he got all defensive about it, as if I were making fun. Anyway, I told the woman that driving north on Highway 83, we’d seen some of the most beautiful land ever. Northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska are not entirely flat, nor entirely agricultural. There is a very pastoral scene there, even if a Nebraska waterway called the Dismal River runs through it. Nebraska, you’ve got some PR to do. You can’t rely entirely on your ‘Huskers to make your name in the world! You need a WillaCatherLand or something.

Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina 44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer's Less: A Novel

Theft By Finding: Root of All Good Writing

8/16/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
William Maxwell
Born August 16, 1908

W. Maxwell

My Book World

Sedaris, David. Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. New York: Little, 2017.

Sedaris explains the meaning of his title right away, stating that in England if you find something, particularly money, you are duty bound to try and locate the owner or else you are guilty of theft by finding. At least in the beginning, when Sedaris is poor, he seems to find all kinds of money. Good thing he’s an American!

The voyeur in me always loves reading authors’ diaries and letters (email has obliterated the latter for future readers), and Sedaris’s diaries are among the best I’ve read. His mind is one that, for the most part, is completely unbridled. He learns early not to edit (in the psychological sense) his writing. He turns a trip to the market into a comic play. His desperate work situations, the same. He records jokes people have told him. He’s not a writer who stays at home, and, because of that, life serves him a big platter of human waste to transform into delectable satire. I marked so many funny or moving passages but I’ll only list a few nuggets here:

“Man to a woman he’d just screwed: If I’d known you
were a virgin, I’d have taken more time.
Woman: If I’d known you had more time, I would have
taken my panty hose off” (35).

“Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents” (112). [I cannot corroborate this anywhere online, but it sounds like Sitwell. Must have thieved it at a party.]

“Deodorizing puck = urinal cake” (130)

From Patricia Marx, in 1986, Sedaris gets a bit of advice we could now pass along to Congress or Trump about how to handle the Russians: “If we want a three-year-old not to put his hand on a hot stove, we do not beat him unmercifully. Rather, we teach him that a stove is hot, by pressing his hand to the burner for a minute or two” (155). We need to press Russia’ fat little hands to the burner!

While working as Santa at SantaLand: “Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample’” (278).

Sedaris’s entries becomes even funnier, in 1993, when his career takes off with Barrel Fever.

“Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, “Come back to bed, I’m freezing’” (391). This was recorded in 1991. Good luck with pulling that stunt now.

Of course, Sedaris’s theft by finding not only refers to the $45 or $50 or $100 he happens upon but also to the stories he hears, dramas that play out around him, whether they be in his family or at airports or in the marketplace. He records his thoughts on world events, Diana’s death in Paris, JFK Junior’s demise. He has something to say about everything, and I believe that is one aspect of his work that makes him a fine writer. Nothing is too highbrow or lowbrow for fodder. Step up to the trough and feed!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-45 Nebraska